THE ROLE OF GREEK AND ROMAN COINS IN THE ART OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

Greek and Roman coins were enthusiastically collected by Renaissance princes and scholars, and provided a rich pool of antique imagery for the painters and sculptors. This study concentrates on two questions which have so far received little attention: which coins were known, or which were the most popular, during the Renaissance, and how were they used by the artists? Fourteenth century documents, including statements by Petrarch, indicate that coin-collecting was already widespread in Italy at the beginning of the Renaissance. Especially important as evidence are the seventy-two portraits of Roman emperors on the margins of the autograph manuscript of Giovanni Mansionario\u27s Historia imperialis (c. 1320); at least forty of these are demonstrably copied from antique coins. An analysis of the coin collection of the Venetian Cardinal Pietro Barbo, recorded in the 1457 inventory of his treasures, reveals the abundance and variety of ancient coins during the Quattrocento. Most of the Cardinal\u27s eleven hundred coins belonged to those types which are most common today, and the prices assigned to them in the inventory show that these objects were remarkably inexpensive, a conclusion supported by other Renaissance documents. Two paintings are examined in detail to explore the attitudes of the artists toward these small antiquities. Francesco Granacci\u27s Birth of St. John the Baptist (Metropolitan Museum) includes six numismatic motifs employed as architectural decoration; Granacci did not copy these coins haphazardly, but selected them with care to symbolize six aspects of the Baptist\u27s mission and character. Titian\u27s Charles V on Horseback (Prado) has been linked already to an ancient imperial coin type, the warlike Profectio; it can be shown, instead, that Titian\u27s model was the Decursio of Nero and Hadrian, an image interpreted by sixteenth century antiquarians as a peaceful or ceremonial display of horsemanship. The bibliography includes a section devoted to the extensive numismatic literature of the Cinquecento